Let’s pretend for a moment that “Juno,” the comedy about the 16- year-old impregnated with the wimpy emo kid’s baby nominated for four Academy Awards, is just another arch little movie and not this year’s lucrative Little Movie That Could.
In fact, let’s pretend that rather than being distributed by Fox Searchlight, “Juno” was a show on Fox called, for convenience’s sake, “Juno.” The movie would seem less like a novelty and more like a very special episode of the sort of sitcom the networks stopped making sometime after “Blossom” and “Clarissa Explains It All.”
But “Juno” has become what didn’t seem possible when it began charming audiences at festivals last fall: a phenomenon.
A “Juno” is now a genre of sardonic high school girl. The film’s suburbanized black slang appears to have infiltrated the zeitgeist (yes, kids, “homeskillet” and “fo’ shizz” have been reapproved for your use), rumors of a “Juno” video game abound, and her hamburger phone is now a must-have piece of kitsch.
“Juno” serves cool, intelligent girls something they rarely see in a movie: themselves. Star Ellen Page perceptively observed this in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.
Juno “dresses like she wants, says what she wants and doesn’t apologize for it.” Page added: “Girls haven’t had that sort of character before. We don’t have our ‘Catcher in the Rye.’ ”
And with screenwriter Diablo Cody as a kind of distaff J.D. Salinger, Page has become Holden Caul field to a generation of underserved girls.
That, of course, is the problem with “Juno.” It’s a mite jaded — not about which boy to take to the prom or how to run for student-body president but about the life-altering decision of whether to be a mom or not. Juno appears to be over her unplanned pregnancy before it’s really begun. She makes haste for an abortion, only to realize the girl at the clinic’s reception desk is more over it than Juno herself.
You get why certain girls have seen “Juno” three or four times, why they’ve erected websites in her honor. The movie flatters them in the same way that “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” flattered entitled boys: by making the title character the only star in the universe. Juno’s father and stepmother just get in line behind her decision. Her mild-as-milk baby-daddy goes along with it. And the husband in the adoptive couple finds himself irresistibly attracted to how hip she is. This isn’t a moralizing work, which in a sense is a relief since it’d be an After School Special if it mongered a message. As it stands, the movie isn’t so much J.D. Salinger as Judy Blume.
I just wished there were someone in the movie to challenge her.
Better yet, I wish the movie had found a worthy outlet for her sense of superiority.
Director Jason Reitman conjures an adorable suburban playground out of tidy framing and “la la la” pop songs. Juno forgoes an abortion not because abortions are wrong but because having one would ruin the innocuousness the movie’s going for. She doesn’t raise the baby because that would cramp her style.
Juno totally explains it all.
The movie’s popularity also resides in its privileged novelty status. It’s doubtful that the same movie about a black or Hispanic teen would be as popular.
Of course, it also could be that Juno is appealing because she doesn’t exactly seem 16. It helps explain why Ellen Page is so good in the part — she gets to channel a disillusioned 30-year-old.
But the movie is a shameless work of glibness too. The Juno character has been written to possess the mental processing style of an adult who casts her teenage experiences in the form she wishes they might be: the stuff of her own happy movie.
Juno might be the most well-adjusted misfit in the history of movies.
